Reverse Probing: Evaluating Knowledge Transfer via Finetuned Task Embeddings for Coreference Resolution

In this work, we reimagine classical probing to evaluate knowledge transfer from simple source to more complex target tasks. Instead of probing frozen representations from a complex source task on diverse simple target probing tasks (as usually done in probing), we explore the effectiveness of embeddings from multiple simple source tasks on a single target task. We select coreference resolution, a linguistically complex problem requiring contextual understanding, as focus target task, and test the usefulness of embeddings from comparably simpler tasks tasks such as paraphrase detection, named entity recognition, and relation extraction. Through systematic experiments, we evaluate the impact of individual and combined task embeddings. Our findings reveal that task embeddings vary significantly in utility for coreference resolution, with semantic similarity tasks (e.g., paraphrase detection) proving most beneficial. Additionally, representations from intermediate layers of fine-tuned models often outperform those from final layers. Combining embeddings from multiple tasks consistently improves performance, with attention-based aggregation yielding substantial gains. These insights shed light on relationships between task-specific representations and their adaptability to complex downstream tasks, encouraging further exploration of embedding-level task transfer.

Cross-Refine: Improving Natural Language Explanation Generation by Learning in Tandem

Natural language explanations (NLEs) are vital for elucidating the reasoning behind large language model (LLM) decisions. Many techniques have been developed to generate NLEs using LLMs. However, like humans, LLMs might not always produce optimal NLEs on first attempt. Inspired by human learning processes, we introduce Cross-Refine, which employs role modeling by deploying two LLMs as generator and critic, respectively. The generator outputs a first NLE and then refines this initial explanation using feedback and suggestions provided by the critic. Cross-Refine does not require any supervised training data or additional training. We validate Cross-Refine across three NLP tasks using three state-of-the-art open-source LLMs through automatic and human evaluation. We select Self-Refine (Madaan et al., 2023) as the baseline, which only utilizes self-feedback to refine the explanations. Our findings from automatic evaluation and a user study indicate that Cross-Refine outperforms Self-Refine. Meanwhile, Cross-Refine can perform effectively with less powerful LLMs, whereas Self-Refine only yields strong results with ChatGPT. Additionally, we conduct an ablation study to assess the importance of feedback and suggestions. Both of them play an important role in refining explanations. We further evaluate Cross-Refine on a bilingual dataset in English and German.

Multilingual Large Language Models and Curse of Multilinguality

Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained large popularity among Natural Language Processing (NLP) researchers and practitioners. These models, trained on huge datasets, show proficiency across various languages and demonstrate effectiveness in numerous downstream tasks. This paper navigates the landscape of multilingual LLMs, providing an introductory overview of their technical aspects. It explains underlying architectures, objective functions, pre-training data sources, and tokenization methods. This work explores the unique features of different model types: encoder-only (mBERT, XLM-R), decoder-only (XGLM, PALM, BLOOM, GPT-3), and encoder-decoder models (mT5, mBART). Additionally, it addresses one of the significant limitations of multilingual LLMs - the curse of multilinguality - and discusses current attempts to overcome it.

CoXQL: A Dataset for Parsing Explanation Requests in Conversational XAI Systems

Conversational explainable artificial intelligence (ConvXAI) systems based on large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant interest from the research community in natural language processing (NLP) and human-computer interaction (HCI). Such systems can provide answers to user questions about explanations, have the potential to enhance users' comprehension and offer more information about the decision-making and generation processes of LLMs. Currently available ConvXAI systems are based on intent recognition rather than free chat. Thus, reliably grasping users' intentions in ConvXAI systems still presents a challenge, because there is a broad range of XAI methods to map requests onto and each of them can have multiple slots to take care of. In order to bridge this gap, we present CoXQL, the first dataset for user intent recognition in ConvXAI, covering 31 intents, seven of which require filling additional slots. Subsequently, we enhance an existing parsing approach by incorporating template validations, and conduct an evaluation of several LLMs on CoXQL using different parsing strategies. We conclude that the improved parsing approach (MP+) surpasses the performance of previous approaches. We also discover that intents with multiple slots remain highly challenging for LLMs.

LLMCheckup: Conversational Examination of Large Language Models via Interpretability Tools

Interpretability tools that offer explanations in the form of a dialogue have demonstrated their efficacy in enhancing users' understanding, as one-off explanations may occasionally fall short in providing sufficient information to the user. Current solutions for dialogue-based explanations, however, require many dependencies and are not easily transferable to tasks they were not designed for. With LLMCheckup, we present an easily accessible tool that allows users to chat with any state-of-the-art large language model (LLM) about its behavior. We enable LLMs to generate all explanations by themselves and take care of intent recognition without fine-tuning, by connecting them with a broad spectrum of Explainable AI (XAI) tools, e.g. feature attributions, embedding-based similarity, and prompting strategies for counterfactual and rationale generation. LLM (self-)explanations are presented as an interactive dialogue that supports follow-up questions and generates suggestions. LLMCheckup provides tutorials for operations available in the system, catering to individuals with varying levels of expertise in XAI and supports multiple input modalities. We introduce a new parsing strategy called multi-prompt parsing substantially enhancing the parsing accuracy of LLMs. Finally, we showcase the tasks of fact checking and commonsense question answering.

InterroLang: Exploring NLP Models and Datasets through Dialogue-based Explanations

While recently developed NLP explainability methods let us open the black box in various ways (Madsen et al., 2022), a missing ingredient in this endeavor is an interactive tool offering a conversational interface. Such a dialogue system can help users explore datasets and models with explanations in a contextualized manner, e.g. via clarification or follow-up questions, and through a natural language interface. We adapt the conversational explanation framework TalkToModel (Slack et al., 2022) to the NLP domain, add new NLP-specific operations such as free-text rationalization, and illustrate its generalizability on three NLP tasks (dialogue act classification, question answering, hate speech detection). To recognize user queries for explanations, we evaluate fine-tuned and few-shot prompting models and implement a novel Adapter-based approach. We then conduct two user studies on (1) the perceived correctness and helpfulness of the dialogues, and (2) the simulatability, i.e. how objectively helpful dialogical explanations are for humans in figuring out the model's predicted label when it's not shown. We found rationalization and feature attribution were helpful in explaining the model behavior. Moreover, users could more reliably predict the model outcome based on an explanation dialogue rather than one-off explanations.

Anaphora Resolution in Dialogue: System Description (CODI-CRAC 2022 Shared Task)

We describe three models submitted for the CODI-CRAC 2022 shared task. To perform identity anaphora resolution, we test several combinations of the incremental clustering approach based on the Workspace Coreference System (WCS) with other coreference models. The best result is achieved by adding the ''cluster merging'' version of the coref-hoi model, which brings up to 10.33% improvement 1 over vanilla WCS clustering. Discourse deixis resolution is implemented as multi-task learning: we combine the learning objective of corefhoi with anaphor type classification. We adapt the higher-order resolution model introduced in Joshi et al. (2019) for bridging resolution given gold mentions and anaphors.